Download adapting to climate change in the mediterranean: Some

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synthèses
N° 01/2008 in ENGLISH | climate change
Adapting to climate change
in the Mediterranean:
Some Questions & Answers
Raphaël Billé, IDDRI
Context
C
1Climate change and
impact research: the
Mediterranean environment (www.circeproject.eu)
2 List of participants,
detailed report from
the
stakeholder
meeting, as well as
presentations delivered by speakers, are
available at www.
circeproject.eu, or at
www.iddri.org
irce1, an EC-funded 4-year research project, aims at developing
for the first time a comprehensive
assessment of climate change impacts in the Mediterranean area.
CIRCE’s rational does not take climate impacts
as direct consequences of climate changes:
the causal relationship is much more complex
since a given climate change leads to very contrasted impacts according to existing policies
as well as to socio-economic and political responses.
This paper freely draws on some findings
from CIRCE’s first stakeholders meeting2, organised by IDDRI in October 2007. A highlevel, focused dialogue among a small group of
selected participants, this meeting was articulated around two key questions:
1 Business models, sector-wide transitions and
socio-economic irreversibilities: is there room
for manoeuvre?
2 Succeeding where we failed: can the climate
challenge be turned into an opportunity?
These questions were examined with regard
to three sectors (agriculture, energy and tourism) and two themes (ecosystems protection
and urban & regional planning). Important
cross-cutting issues for the Mediterranean
such as water management, regional security,
international migrations, etc., were dealt with
in the discussions along the two days.
The following questions & answers therefore owe a lot to the meeting participants,
although its limits and potential misinterpretations are the sole responsibility of the
author.
Adaptation in the Mediterranean:
why is it necessary?
As it appears in IPCC’s 2007 report, the Mediterranean is a climate change vulnerability
“hotspot”. It is hence often stated that climate
change is the greatest challenge to regional
sustainable development in the 21st century.
Indeed, it is and will increasingly be a major
driver of environmental and socio-economic
changes in the Mediterranean. Increased waterscarcity, for example, would critically raise the
vulnerability of a number of countries that are
already under heavy water stress, and would
have widespread impacts on “water poor countries3”.
At the same time, climate change is only one
among a wide range of such drivers (including
The region is on course for an unstable,
dirty and expensive future under all
reasonable climate scenarios. The present
situation, as well as long-term projections,
are highly unsustainable. In most cases,
climate change reinforces these trends.
3Countries
where
water availability is
less than 1 000 m3 /
year / person (namely
Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt).
4E.g. aiming at a +2°C
target.
5In that regard, the
Mediterranean is not
an isolated region
but one that is deeply immerged and
integrated in global
governance and the
world economy.
economic, sectoral, cultural, political, etc.). Several of these may well be far more determining for Mediterranean societies than climate
change per se – depending on issues, contexts
and time frames.
It does not seem necessary to decide whether
climate change is the greatest challenge or an
additional one: time will tell, and in any case
it has to be addressed. What is certain is that
the region is on course for an unstable, dirty
and expensive future under all reasonable climate scenarios. The present situation, as well
as long-term projections, are highly unsustainable. In most cases, climate change reinforces
these trends. Even though climate change is
likely to have some positive effects, there is no
example at hand where climate trends would
reverse or even ease such unsustainable situations.
Therefore, all Mediterranean societies and
businesses will need to adapt, on a continuum
between those directly affected by changes in
climate to those indirectly affected by climate-
driven socio-economic changes. It should specifically be underlined that if our societies turn
out to be serious about keeping greenhouse
gas emissions at a manageable level4, adaptation will also be about adapting to future mitigation policies.5 These could have major and
structural effects on the way Mediterranean
societies live and do business. In many cases,
synergies will exist between mitigation and
adaptation options. Nevertheless, there will
undoubtedly be circumstances under which
adaptation and mitigation policies shall be antagonistic: thorny decisions will then have to
be made.
Adaptation capacity in the
Mediterranean: is it high or low?
The Mediterranean has had to deal with, and
adapt to, serious climate stresses throughout
history. Chronic water scarcity and heat waves,
for example, have been described in some places for well over 2 000 years. Besides, basically
all societies and economic sectors around the
Mediterranean have experienced changes of
unprecedented magnitude and speed over the
last century. In that sense, they all have demonstrated immense adaptation capacities.
In today’s world, we actually have little knowledge about the capacity of current, discussed
or planned adaptation efforts to cope successfully with future climate change. A number of
heavy assumptions already circulate in the adaptation community: for example, that the rich
have higher adaptation capacity than the poor;
that adaptation capacity is higher at the local
level; or that the private sector can adapt more
easily than the public sector.
What can be asserted is that adaptation capacity probably varies substantially between
sectors, places and populations. And that there
is already some evidence that some of these
largely over-estimate their own adaptive capacity. In particular, major governance issues, especially in Southern Mediterranean countries,
will most likely severely hinder timely and efficient adaptation.
Finding out if the above mentioned assumptions rely on evidence-base science, or if they
are rather clichés that need to be challenged,
requires additional detailed research linking
global and regional issues to local case studies.
CIRCE shall be an important contribution to
this end.
Iddri | Synthèse n° 01/2008 | Adapting to climate change in the Mediterranean: Some Questions & Answers, Raphaël Billé
in english
Adaptation strategies
and instruments: what can
we say about what to do?
In terms of “who should do what”, adaptation
raises numerous challenging questions on the
relative roles of individual versus cooperative
actions, market-driven vs. policy-driven adaptations, anticipatory vs. ex-post adaptation, local vs. national or international policy making.
What is more, adaptation strategies also range
from short to long term endeavours, from collective choices to specific, ad hoc initiatives,
and from marginal changes in day-to-day practices to major sector-wide transitions and ultimately comprehensive re-assessments of the
current development models, challenging the
very way we think about future.
It is quite clear however that there is no single, one-size-fits-all solution at hand. Rather, a
portfolio of technologies, initiatives and policies is required, that re-emphasizes the need
to link economic development with sound
environmental and natural resources management.
To name only a few, capacity building, insurance mechanisms and incentive policies, subsi-
Because climate change invites
Mediterranean societies to re-examine
a number of development models,
from the largest scale to sectoror place-specific cases.
6 Such as the ones
captured by the “virtual water” concept:
Southern
Mediterranean countries are
net exporters of water
to Northern Mediterranean if agricultural
water inputs are
taken into account.
dies, market frameworks, food security and social safety nets are of outstanding importance.
“Mainstreaming” adaptation into up-coming
policy reforms, including at the EU-level as
with the Common Agricultural Policy, is essential. Indeed, they may strongly constrain the
development paths not only within Europe but
in Southern and Eastern Mediterranean countries. Urban and regional planning can also
take us a long way into adaptation, and lots of
measures that should be adopted to fight air
pollution in cities are actually good for climate
change adaptation as well. The value of services
provided by various terrestrial and coastal ecosystems around the Mediterranean, and therefore the importance of keeping them healthy
and functioning, should be better understood,
assessed and factored in decision making.
Generally speaking, there is a need for more
elaborated assessments of climate change impacts on all economic sectors as a first step
for action. It calls for improved science on impacts, which often requires collaboration from
all stakeholders including the industry.
If adaptation is about societies more than
about nature and climate, it is crucial to better
understand human reasoning. We can actually
build on 30 years of empirical research on public perception of risk, a field of its own in the
social sciences. We have learnt that different
types of risks are perceived in different ways:
for instance, people tend to overestimate the
risk of dying from a terrorist attack compared
to a heart attack. They also weigh more costs
than benefits – a crucial information for climate change adaptation. What about the risk
of suffering from climate change and the costs
and benefits of anticipating it?
Is the need for adaptation
really bad news… or can it be
turned into an opportunity?
As to whether climate change can be turned
into an opportunity through adaptation to accomplish long-needed transitions, there is no
easy answer. The array of opportunities actually varies considerably. It is quite obvious that
climate change will severely constrain local
development and hence the variety of choices
available. It is also clear that adaptation will
take time and will require significant investments – even though business as usual would
undoubtedly cost more in the long run.
But opportunities do exist. Firstly because
climate change will have positive effects:
there will not only be losers but also winners.
More importantly, because climate change invites Mediterranean societies to re-examine
a number of development models, from the
largest scale to sector- or place-specific cases.
Increasingly, the adaptation debate points out
climate change as a lever to reorient what are
commonly called “absurd policies” and associated unsustainable trends.6 Changing such
policies and reversing those trends is seen as a
first, key step to climate change adaptation. To
Iddri | Synthèse n° 01/2008 | Adapting to climate change in the Mediterranean: Some Questions & Answers, Raphaël Billé
in english
some extent, adapting to future climate change
implies to adapt first to current climate variability, and even more simply to current climate. However, there are people/sectors/places
that benefit from unsustainable policies, so
that using climate change as a lever to sustainability will raise oppositions and require politically painful choices.
In any case, sustainable ecosystem management is clearly brought back to the centre of
the debate on climate change by the adaptation
agenda. Threats on ecosystems are not direct
consequences of climate change, but primarily
of other heavy trends like water pollution, land
use change and resources overexploitation. Climate change only reinforces present negative
trends. It calls for better policy implementation to succeed where we largely failed so far
in the Mediterranean: managing biodiversity
and natural resources in a sustainable way. In
a sense, one could even argue that there is little news in what climate change brings to the
Mediterranean ecosystems issue.
Finally, as has historically always been the
case when it comes to sustainable development,
there is a lot of wishful thinking about adaptation. Since the scientific community started
discussing the subject, and since it emerged
on the political agenda, constraints have increased and available options have reduced.
Decision makers are still to be convinced and
climate change is still to be turned into a business opportunity for adaptation efforts to really take off. It would be naïve to assume that
adaptation will happen just because it should,
because it is in most people’s best interest either individually or collectively. o
Iddri | Synthèse n° 01/2008 | Adapting to climate change in the Mediterranean: Some Questions & Answers, Raphaël Billé
in english